If Palkan had a rupee for every time her eyes welled with tears when her name was called in Grade 4, she would have a tower of coins as tall as herself. Her classmates would describe her as an unusually silent girl with neatly tied hair, sitting in one corner of the class, who wouldn’t speak unless spoken to. Nine-year old and sixteen-year old Palkan looked almost identical, almost afraid of every loud word around her and delicate in every small way. To everyone else, she was just another girl who had grown used to being invisible. But was there more to her than what met everyone’s eyes?
The first hero a daughter ever finds is undeniably her father who makes this giant daunting world under her feet look smaller. Early in her life, Palkan began to copy her father in the tiniest of ways. “If he adjusted his watch, I would adjust mine. If he crossed his arms when talking, I would cross mine as well. And so, since he was an engineer, I grew up to study engineering too.” And this was no act of blind imitation. “Being the eldest of all his brothers and cousins, I saw my father do the most work and be the responsible man of the house. I saw him give more than he got. I wanted to be just like him.” But then, the toughest part of being just like her father was also learning how to become a rebel in a glass house.
There is this one child in every Indian family who’s the apple of everyone’s eye. Palkan, being the firstborn in a family of 24 with uncles and aunts aplenty, was showered with all the love in the world. She, drenched in affection, was sent off to her nani’s house for the summer vacations. “That’s the best way for my mom to get rid of me,” she laughs melting in the nostalgia. Being an extra pampered kid, also spoiled for choices, she was extremely stubborn. “I would only eat Monaco biscuits, orange candies, kaju and dosa at my Nanis. I got stacks of them to stuff myself with. Dare anyone to make me eat anything else.” Her Nani, of course, would make her delicious crispy dosas three times a day.
By 17, she was able to move out of her little introverted shell, spoke more freely and had a small circle of friends by the time she joined college. Because she was so surrounded by care, she grew up to be very picky. She had her own little rules about whom she spoke her heart with. She was a back-bencher for all her programming and law lectures, but easily a subject topper when it came to physics and mathematics. Palkan glued her sights on engineering to mirror her father and took up a dual degree in engineering and marketing. Her first couple of years at NMIMS were surprisingly relaxed. Yes she really did work hard during exams. But it was only when her third year internships had her doing field sales and desk jobs that the ‘work-life’ a girl raised in a bubble of love had only seen through the glass walls, had to be faced.
